La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World - A presentation by Patricia Ybarra

Organized by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota.

Patricia Ybarra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown University. Her current work is on Latino theater under neoliberalism.  She is the author of Performing Conquest: Five centuries of Theater, History and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico.

“La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World” explores a performance by Soame Citlalime, a group of mestizo and indigenous identified women from Tlaxcala, Mexico who co-wrote a play about their lives as women left behind by family members who migrated to the US for work. This talk claims that the play is a mode of political speech for the women who write and perform it which is both a critique of Neoliberalism and a form of Neoliberal cultural production. In writing about a play largely funded by remittance money raised from relatives in the US, Professor Ybarra argues for artistic production as part of a growing remittance culture, suggesting that social change projects need to be read within the frame of neoliberal transmissions and that modes of identity construction need to be read in this light as well.